Shima melds tastes, traditions well A pan-Asian restaurant comes in handy if you are having trouble making a decision. But thanks to several openings in the last year, Portlanders looking for a menu with several Asian cuisines will have to make a choice.

Sweet tastes, beautiful building, heavenly reward Few of us bother to go to church, so Mainers must find ways to reuse our houses of worship, just as we do our riverside mills in this post-industrial age. While several restaurants have put mothballed mill buildings to use, Grace Restaurant's repurposing of the Chestnut Street Methodist Church is the most impressive reclamation project yet.

Twenty Milk's excellent lawn-dining experience Portland's Old Port is most beautiful just when it is least hospitable — in the bitter cold of winter when the crowds dissipate and Pandora LaCasse's whimsical lights decorate the streets. Recently the Portland Regency Hotel has endeavored to capture some of the charms of winter in warmer months.

The Salt Exchange experiments with food In last week's New York Times , David Brooks suggested that for people who are not parents there are "no grand designs..., no high ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose meaning."

The best of Milan in Portland One of my earliest culinary memories is of my father bringing home a tin of hard, crisp, almondy Italian cookies. As my sisters and I ate, my father dimmed the lights and put a match to the thin paper wrappers. They began to float like enchanted lanterns. I thought these Italians must be magical.

El Rayo lets the ingredients shine We live in an era in which we are grateful when people get the big things right, even if the details are off. Too often these days we find the opposite: well-titled books with little insight, an economy that "grows" but produces nothing of actual value, clever people who lack the deeper qualities of character.

Eve's at the Garden's lovely new happy-hour menu Nothing democratizes like nature. Rousseau thought all primitives were equal until the moment someone thought to build a hut and move indoors. Nowadays people who would never enjoy similar books, films, or music nonetheless appreciate the beauty of the outdoors in much the same way.

Rockland's Primo finds the future in past traditions Popular tastes wax, wane, and wander about, but over the long run people most appreciate those things that are timelessly simple, elegant, and right: Roger Federer's backhand, German-expressionist art, cotton, and the summer here in Maine.

Exploring GRO Café's uncooked cuisine The new GRO Café offers a vegan menu on which (almost) nothing has been heated beyond 112 degrees. This is supposed to preserve something raw-foodists call "living enzymes," which they imagine to be important to our health. Technically that is nonsense.

Where to go for the ultimate summertime burgers The greasy, informal meals of summer lead to lots of uncouth mouth-cramming and finger-licking. It is best not to look. For this reason, many purveyors of the quintessential summertime burger are set up for shoulder-to-shoulder eating.